Elk
The elk appears a page before the text that treats it. It bleeds thickly to the recto, to text that treats the elephant [Figure One]. Its right fore-foot—used, Topsell reports, to “pierce the Wolves or Dogs skins, as with any sharp pointed Spear or Javelin”—is readied (note 1). The elk’s presence here among the elephants is jarring: it “could not live in any country of the world but, but the hot,” and these “will not preserve” it (note 2). The elk’s fur is visible beneath the text. These creatures are “like unto Goats in their spotted skins,” writes Topsell, and the letters lend dappling where the woodcutter could not (note 3). Summers, the elk are “of russet colour, and in the winter brown or blackish colour,” so the dark text tells season too (note 4). The hide itself is weirdly leaky and “may be discerned from the Harts skin by blowing upon it, for the breath will come through” (note 5). The paper, then, apes the skin. It lets ink pass through just as the elk’s skin lets air pass. Elk keep to “the wet, watery, and marshy places, delighting in nothing but moisture” (note 6). They are as such mopey, lonesome, “melancholick” (note 7). They brim, that is, with black bile. At printing, runny ink, the elk’s dark humor, oozed through the dampened paper from one face to the other. And yet, to say that the bleeding beast, here on the recto, is entirely elk will not do, for it metamorphoses the elephant’s letters into its picture. Surrounding Topsell’s words, lending lively figure to the blocky text, the elk is, as well, a calligram shaped of, and shaping, the elephant’s description. What comes is neither prose precisely nor picture; neither elk entirely nor elephant. Some new beast—as if the black humor had not dried—is even now metamorphosing.
note 1. Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects (London: Ellen Cotes for George Sawbridge, Thomas Williams, and Thomas Johnson, 1658), 169.
note 2. Ibid, 165.
note 3. Ibid, 167.
note 4. Ibid.
note 5. Ibid, 169.
note 6. Ibid, 167.
note 7. Ibid.